Project Title: The Seven Ages of Man
Team members: Frank Yucheng Bao & Mia Mingyin Xue
A. Concept & Story
The audio of this video is based on the poem “The seven ages of man” written by famous British poet William Shakespeare. The main idea of the poem is that Shakespeare attempt to describe characteristics of various life stages, and also abstract some features underlying his beautiful words and phrases. Mia and I first began our brainstorming by looking for some poem videos on the internet because we want to find a narration that is artistic both in vocabulary and tone. After the search, we find a video shot by BBC that show the many movie clips with Benedict Cumberbatch’s voiceover. Both of us are attracted by the emotions and feeling this poem convey and finally, we decided to create our project based on this material to come up with many visual metaphors to correspond to the narrations. The reason Mia and I want to explore this topic is mainly that the main idea “life stages” is quite interesting– the poem actually provides us a large space for imagination and a really large picture of its narrative perspective. Also, Shakespeare is one of my favorite poets because of his gorgeous vocabulary and unique description. I always can feel deep meaning under his poem which brings me pounder over the thoughtful ideas.
B. Creation Process & Execution
Above is the developed storyboard of our project after Mia and I thought about many possible visual metaphors corresponding to the narration. The creation of a storyboard is really helpful because it likes a detailed plan and guidance which leads us to shoot and edit efficiently. Also, the storyboard visualizes some scenes for us. Mia and I actually based on this version of the storyboard to create more related scenes to make the transitions go more smoothly.
For the setting part, at first, Mia and I tried to set all stuff on the white table in front of the white wall on the common space in our dorm. We shot the demo in the beginning, but during the in-class critique, we get the suggestion that we should create a more clean background. So Mia and I were looking for a shooting tent with a white waterproof thick background in Taobao. This mini tent is really helpful for us to create our ideal background, which also makes it easy for us to do the color adjustment in the editing part.
The most challenging part of the content creation is to think about the appropriate visual metaphors which correspond to the narration and also are creative. For our narration, there are seven different stages of human life and each of them has various characteristics and features. In this case, our metaphors also need to contain different features. At the same time, at the beginning of the brainstorming, Mia and I struggled with the metaphors we came up with because we thought that many of them are neither too straightforward nor too abstract. One Suggestion got from Yunmi is that if we want to express A and B, we can shoot C to cover the overall. The solution for our strugglings is that we present our metaphors to our friends to let them provide some feedback to us, whether these metaphors are effective or not.
For the editing part, we spent a lot of time doing the color adjustment and also the timing stuff because we want our visual information to be strongly related to the audio and the background music. It is really hard to unify all the colors for each scene, but we are trying our best to make it smooth within the sections and the transitions.
C. Collaboration
Mia and I spent some days brainstorm and creating the storyboard together. We invite our friend Eric Li to be the voice actor because his voice is really matching our style and also his vocal talents. Basically, Mia and I share the work together. Both of us are taking the responsibility to shoot and edit. In the shooting part, Mia mainly controls the camera for shooting, and I am more focused on the setting and lighting. Really thank Mia because of her effort to patiently collaborate with me, because sometimes we may have some different ideas about the specific scene. She always listens to my opinions and thinks about how to integrate our ideas together. After the critique of our rough edit, we furthermore adjust the color of the background and also add background music to create a tensive atmosphere with the drumbeats in the music.
D. Aesthetics & Results
Basically, white is the main color of our background because we want to keep the consistency of the visual scene. The overall visual part we create is clean and stable(consistent), because we want to express the whole life stage from a really objective point of view (kind of third person). For the feeling of the video, our intentions are to make it information-intensive which can express the concept of time is running fast. The whole style for our project is like people is watching or skimming a life-long history book– we want to lead the audience to think about the whole life in a really short time. This feeling actually is enhanced because of our really excellent voiceover.